We’ve been chopped, cooked, grilled in a Cutthroat Kitchen where Food Feuds, Food Fights and even full-blown Kitchen Nightmares prevail. We’ve even lived through four years of Cupcake Wars that have left their scars on some of the Worst Cooks in America. Aren’t we on the verge of being Fed Up?

There’s seemingly no end of book, film and television show titles to sate the appetite of our apparently food-obsessed culture. So now, add a new title to the list, The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity, a new book by renowned scholar Sandra M. Gilbert, that examines not so much the food itself but, instead, the phenomenon of eating memoirs, chef biographies, food porn, diet books, quack websites, cookbooks and competitive cooking shows (or is that repetitive cooking shows?) out there. All of this, together, makes up foodie culture, which sometimes seems to be the only culture we have anymore. Food is life, food is sex, food is death, food is humankind’s struggle, food is love . . . and just about any other lazy metaphor you can come up with.

But, while foodie culture may seem more mainstream and saturated than it has in the past, iconoclast Gilbert argues that it’s not so novel, after all. Author of a number of books, including the wildly influential literary treatise, The Madwoman in the Attic (co-authored with Susan Gubar), Gilbert takes the long (and somewhat iconoclastic) view of food and culture and argues that a lot of what we think we know about it is wrong.

First off, the new foodism wasn’t just born from the loins of Julia Child. Turns out there was plenty of decent food in North America before The French Chef started giving lessons on Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But we cling to a myth that everyone ate tuna-noodle casserole made with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup until, suddenly, Julia and a few other food personalities curated by Judith Jones sprung onto the scene and taught the continent how to cook, eat and enjoy life. As remarkable as we all agree Julia is, Gilbert points out that this story, which she calls the Taste of American Culinary Transformation (TACT), conveniently leaves out the stories of the communities who probably never heard of tuna-noodle casserole because they were too busy making risotto. Or latkes. Or gumbo. Meaning, TACT is starting to sound a little like it might be mostly a WASP thing.

Even then, Gilbert argues, the bad-food-to-good-food shift is probably exaggerated. War-time rationing and the Great Depression put a dent into good food in the Americas and fast food filled in the void after post-war prosperity resumed. Gilbert quibbles with food historians who blame bad food on women going to work (convenient targets, always) and points out that the Colonel’s recipe of 11 herbs and spices had been locked down and McDonald’s had already served 500 million hamburgers long before Betty Friedan ever thought about the problem that had no name.

What Gilbert demonstrates, brilliantly, is that at various times and in various cultural contexts, it just wasn’t considered good table manners to go on about the merits of the contents of your plate, let alone display the orgiastic enthusiasm over food that is currently de rigeur. What’s changed, then, isn’t the food so much as the way we talk (and talk and talk) about it. Even that, she says, might be an oversimplification, since, as she deftly details, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Alexander Pope, Gustave Flaubert and just about every other canonical author wove food into the great classics.

So, while blown-up, not entirely new. And nobody better to tell the surprisingly long history of foodism than this authoritative literary scholar. Thanks to her, our love of foodie lore is finally fully Unwrapped.

Christine Sismondo is the author of America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops.

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